Journal of Historical Geography

Eighteenth-century London, like other contemporary European metropolitan centres, experienced a substantial excess of recorded burials over baptisms. The importance of this phenomenon has long been recognized, but its origins and nature have received relatively little empirical study. A preliminary analysis of data from the London Bills of Mortality has suggested that levels of mortality in the capital were unusually severe for much of the period. The present paper is based on an analysis of association between short-run movements in burial totals in the Bills and those in certain price and meteorological series. This reveals a complex pattern reflecting both the direct effects of ecological fluctuations and their indirect effects mediated by variations in migratory streams. The scope and limitations of such a short-run analysis are discussed and appropriate statistical techniques reviewed. Data on prices, temperature and rainfall are considered in conjunction with burial totals broken down by age and cause of death. The importance of spatial structure and migration patterns to the understanding of early modern metropolitan vital regimes is stressed.

The importance of space and distance in the development of social and political institutions has been increasingly recognized in recent years. Some of the research carried out by historical geographers has raised important methodological and epistemological questions as well as substantive empirical issues about the impact of distance on the provision of medical services over time. This essay reviews this literature with particular reference to the debate about the capacity of distance–decay models to explain the varied use made of lunatic asylums in the nineteenth century. The authors offer a critical assessment of the method of contextualization found in earlier scholarship and suggest an alternative approach to the problem of measuring institutional distance and the contemporary influence of knowledge on behaviour. A detailed analysis of admissions to the Devon County Asylum in the Victorian and Edwardian period reveals both the significance of distance on the entry of individuals to this institution and the scope for understanding distance in relation to a range of other factors. In contrast to some other writers, we argue that the «local knowledge» of different actors and the changing structure of the British state in this period were critical factors shaping the changing pattern of admission.

Because medical records of individuals contracting measles were not kept in northwest lceland for epidemics before 1904, the spread of the disease in 1846 and 1882 has been traced from notifications of death recorded in burial registers and census returns. Using this evidence, a time-space matrix of measles deaths has been constructed and the dynamics of the diffusion process through a necklace of small communities strung along the coast has been analysed. In each of the three epidemics the mortality curve corresponded closely to an S-shaped logistic model, each new epidemic passing through the area more rapidly than its predecessor. The operation of a neighbourhood effect from a single point of introduction implies that the disease should move in a wave-like form through the area. Whereas the 1882 epidemic advanced steadily as a wave-front progression characteristic of the neighbourhood effect, those of 1846 and 1904 had strong spatial biases towards the parish of Eyri. The intense localization of the outbreaks in 1846 and 1904 appears not to be related directly to distinctive features in the demography or form of the settlement. In 1904 a confirmation service held in Eyri church brought many victims into contact with a measles carrier, but no special circumstances have been reported or can be deduced for 1846.

This paper discusses inheritance patterns among rich farmers in the South Island of New Zealand with particular reference to the connections between the family and farming property. While sources such as letters and family papers highlight individuals, probate inventories are used here to give an important quantitative perspective. Although ownership records reflect an overwhelming concentration of land in the hands of male settlers, probates disclose an important, although subordinate, role for women, not only domestic production but also, when widows, as custodians of estates. These inheritance patterns have something in common with other regions of recent settlement, and suggest that farming women's space extended beyond the domestic sphere.

The growth of population in nineteenth-century Britain has often been attributed to the decline in mortality during that period. Here the relationship between improvements in sanitary conditions and the fall in disease mortality is considered for one particular city in the period 1870–1910. Medical Officer of Health reports are used to show the spatiotemporal patterns of both a selection of fatal diseases and sanitary conditions in Birmingham in the 1880s. This evidence suggests that administrative developments in hospital provision, for instance, need to be combined with public health improvements in any explanation of mortality decline. Further, that poverty, as reflected by back to back housing, is more closely associated with high mortality than variables measuring sanitary conditions.

Data from a number of countries show much higher mortality rates in urban than in rural areas in the nineteenth century. In this paper we examine the urban-rural mortality differential in the death registration states of the United States in 1890 and 1900. Before proceeding with the analysis, the data are evaluated and we determine that the data used for the 1900 analysis are more complete than data used in other analyses for the same date. An attempt is made to correct for the deficiencies in the 1890 data. When the urban and rural mortality levels are examined for individual states at both dates, urban mortality is generally higher than rural mortality. However, there is variability across states in urban mortality levels, rural mortality levels, and the urban-rural mortality differences. In general, the urban-rural mortality difference is larger in 1890 than in 1900. When the urban-rural mortality differences are examined in terms of the causes of death which account for the differential, we conclude that higher urban mortality rates are generally attributable to a few diseases—tuberculosis, diarrheal diseases and several other communicable diseases—the transmission of which depend heavily on close human contact or contamination of the environment.

This paper presents a case study in the historical reconstruction of the spatial and temporal links by which an infectious disease spreads through a human population. The choice of area (northwest Iceland), the time (the summer of 1904) and the epidemic (measles) are conditioned by the remarkable richness of the historical records for the events described. These records include descriptive accounts in the form of doctors' reports and newspaper articles, and numerical evidence in the shape of morbidity and mortality records collected by doctors and parish priests. The nature of these sources is discussed and illustrated. The information contained in them is used to reconstruct the spread process at both regional (northwest Iceland) and local scales (two parishes in the centre of the area most heavily affected by the disease). It is shown that the pattern of spread can be interpreted in terms of conventional spatial diffusion models. It also highlights the importance of the networks of social contacts—in this case revolving around a church confirmation ceremony—in producing widespread dissemination of the disease.

While the nature of physical health in inter-war Wales has generated widespread interest, the mental health of the general public in this period has received considerably less attention. This omission is somewhat curious given that, as we will show in this paper, the collapse of the regional economy, based primarily on coal and metal working industries, raised social and political concerns about issues of depression and stress in this modern and heavily industrialized region. When Harold Callender from the New York Times toured the region in 1938 he reported how “many communities dependent upon coal have shrunk into dilapidation. . .while the boarded-over shop fronts and the unemployed men, wearing scarves and caps standing aimlessly in doorways and upon the streets, testify to some of the effects of prolonged depression”. In this paper, we address the impact of this economic depression on the mental health of the population through a re-examination of the activities of charitable organizations who came to work with the unemployed in the South Wales coalfield. We argued that just as the mental life of the modern metropolis was being exposed to retheorization, through the disciplines of psychology and sociology, so the communities in South Wales, as a modern industrial zone, were exposed to comparable material forces and similar retheorizations. By acknowledging these processes and through outlining the modernity of the charitable intervention, we draw out the relationships between environmental and psychological knowledge as they were worked through in the interpretation of unemployment in the region. These modern ideas about the psyche, we show, had important consequences for the depiction and treatment of the human subject and found a particular expression in South Wales in the 1930s where they collided with existing notions about environment, landscape and identity.

In the inter-war period there was a dialogue between modern architecture and planning and the concerns of health reformers and practitioners. This paper examines that dialogue in the context of two health centres built in London in the 1930s—the Pioneer Health Centre (1935) and the Finsbury Health Centre (1938). Both of these buildings are landmarks in the history of British modernism and they share that movement's concern with hygienic design, the utilization of sunlight and fresh air, and the value of propaganda in health education. However, they differ in their ideological or social programmes. Whilst the Pioneer Health Centre expressed a conservative belief in private health funding and the family, the Finsbury Health Centre was part of the radical regeneration of the Borough according to socialist principles of State funding and citizenship. The paper ends by considering what these examples tell us about the history of modernism.

Until the last third of the nineteenth century, scientific research on Palestine was sporadic, initiated usually by single individuals and religious and social organisations. This was also the case with the increasing flow of publications, which were issued in a wide range of periodicals, books and newspapers. The foundation of research societies aimed specifically at the scientific research of the Holy Land was, in many aspects, a turning point in this field. The Palestine Exploration Fund started its work in 1865 and its German twin, Der Deutsche Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas, followed 12years later. Both societies and their periodicals produced many changes in the directions and focuses of the study of the Holy Land, and also in the ways it was organized, directed and performed. The people who stood behind the establishments, their background and interests, studies and motivations, must be understood in order to explain the means and fields of research chosen by the two societies. The geopolitical situation in the Middle East, and the struggle between the European countries in the Holy Land, were also a major factor. The comparison between these societies, their foundation, means of activity, and main directions of studies, explains their central role in the scientific research on Palestine before World War I.

This paper examines the production of systems for the regulation of colonial sexualities. Challenging binarised imperial discourse, which attributes the production of sexualised imperialism and imperial sexuality to the metropolitan centre, the paper acknowledges the productivity of colonial margins, and begins to map the complex dispersal of agency across the multidimensional colonial divide. Three case studies in this paper illustrate mechanisms of imposition of British legislation in colonial contexts, but they also identify forms of agency that allowed colonists to either follow or deviate from British models. These case studies, drawn from South Australia and New South Wales at crucial junctures in the production of their legislation on the regulation of sexuality, reveal sexualities that were produced and regulated not simply through crude relations of domination and subordination, but by and through a more complex historical–geographical web of power relations. This paper contributes to a broader complication and deconstruction of imperial binaries and, by examining agency and productivity on the colonial margins, widens the scope of histories and geographies of moral regulation.

S amuel A maral, The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires 1785–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xviii +359. $64.95 hardback) B. J. Barickman , A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xx +276. $56.00 hardback) S tephen B ell, Campanha Gaúcha: A Brazilian Ranching System, 1850–1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xv +292. $55.00 hardback) D oug Y arrington, A Coffee Frontier: Land, Society, and Politics in Duaca, Venezuela, 1830–1936 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Pp. xiv +267. $19.95 paperback)

This paper examines racial cartography—a neglected subject in recent geographical work on the construction of race which has tended to dwell on photographic and museum representations. After sketching in something of the tradition of Victorian anthropometry, and its stress on categorizing human beings, it is argued that race is a socially constructed phenomenon, resulting partly from these obsessions. Using the conceptual framework developed by J. B. Harley this paper focuses on the cartographic products of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, during the early twentieth century. It concentrates specifically on anthropometric maps of pigmentation in Scotland, presented in the work of three anthropologists, John Gray, James Tocher and John Beddoe.

The spatial and the historical dimensions of disability have both been poorly documented and analysed. The spatial social sciences—geography, urban planning and architecture—have either largely ignored or trivialized the issue of disability. The discipline of History has also paid scant attention to the question of disability. This paper contributes to the historical–geographical understanding of disability in Australia by exploring the spatial context of physical impairment in nineteenth-century Melbourne. The paper seeks (i) to locate disabled people in nineteenth-century Melbourne by showing where and how they lived; and (ii) to illustrate the socio-spatial relations that shaped their lives. A range of primary and secondary materials is consulted. The key primary source is the set of case records left by the Melbourne Ladies' Benevolent Society, the city's principal source of outdoor charity. Although the social geographical focus of the paper is on the historical domestic environment, the analysis also considers other key social spaces, notably institutional and employment settings. The paper traces some of the important socio-spatial relationships that connected domestic space to other key sites in disabled people's everyday lives.

This paper considers the relationship of diet and national health proposed by organicists in mid twentieth century England. After introducing the theoretical and historical context of dietary debate it discusses organicist diagnoses of the relationship between soil and health, and describes local experiments undertaken in Cheshire and Peckham. The paper then outlines the principles of wholeness and freshness underlying the desired organic diet, and considers the organicists» proposals for the use of animal and human wastes. Throughout the paper the geographies of organicism are emphasised; the constitution of national argument through imperial research and local experiment, the geographies of food production and consumption, the dialectical geography of dung. Organicism should be understood as part of a body culture claiming values of nature and nation in a critique of modernity, and working through particular formulations of gender, race and class.

In 1895, an innovation in the provision of model housing by manufacturers occurred with the development by George Cadbury of Bournville Model Village. This was the first model settlement to provide low-density housing not restricted to factory employees. This paper uses the Bournville archives to explore the accepted history of this settlement. It is argued that the accepted history is a particular reading of this planning experiment. The paper explores the construction of the «accepted history», identifies some of the authors behind the history and uses the minute books and secretary reports of Bournville Village Trust to construct an alternative historical narrative. The alternative history is one in which Bournville begins as a building estate rather than as a model village. The building estate was provided with no community facilities, and the houses were targeted at the lower- and upper- middle classes. Cadbury repackaged the building estate by appropriating the garden city movement, in return the garden city movement also appropriated Bournville by using it as a working example of a model garden village. The paper makes a contribution to theoretical debate by linking a literature from organizational studies concerned with story-telling and construction to historical geography.

Descriptive terms often persist even when the objects or phenomena described change. Any one term can come to have many meanings. «Township» is such a term with different meanings: a «township» was not always different from a «town», nor was it always synonymous with a «town». At the time when «township» was acquiring a new function and significance in Britain, its multiple usage was carried into New England where the term was then newly applied. This paper argues that from its original meaning, the term «township» acquired new meanings and that as the term diffused, so its meaning was modified. It also argues that when such a term comes to be used widely throughout the world, its use can be made to throw light on the diffusion of the concept and of the object or phenomena to which it refers.

The nineteenth-century public house was seen as a demoralizing institution by temperance reformers, the police, and government. These concerns were prompted in part by changes to the internal spaces of the pub. It is argued that suggested changes to the licensing system were driven by a desire to regulate and discipline drinkers. Reading Parliamentary reports from 1852–4 and 1896–8 as moral geographies informed by developments in early social science, it becomes clear that three issues of space were felt to be vital: the separation of the pub from other public and private spaces; the power to supervise drinkers in open spaces; and the dangers of enclosed compartments where drinking could be conducted secretly. Despite the antagonism between representatives of the licensed trade and those elements of the government who supported temperance, the value of surveillance had been almost universally recognized by the end of the century. In this way, pub discipline and morality became «a problem of supervision».

From the late 1880s until the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 thousands of Ukrainian peasants emigrated from the Austrian provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna, seeking agricultural lands on the frontiers of settlement in Canada and Brazil. This paper traces the process of emigration, settlement, and the creation of the Ukrainian pioneer diaspora through the actions of the Morski family of Khmelyska, Galicia, whose members established pioneer settlements in Manitoba, Canada, and in Paraná, Brazil. The effects of the physical environment and of the institutional frameworks experienced on each frontier help to explain differences in the rate of economic progress, assimilation and integration into the mainstream culture of the host societies.

The marshlands of Kent and Essex had exceptionally high levels of mortality from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The unhealthiness of the environment aroused frequent comment during this period and it was attributed to an endemic disease known as “marsh fever” or “ague”. Marsh parishes were perceived both as a danger to the local inhabitants and as a deterrent to potential settlers. This paper traces the geography and history of the “marsh fever” in England and shows that the disease was, in fact, plasmodium malaria transmitted by anopheline mosquitoes. Malaria, once indigenous in the coastal marshes of England, had a striking impact on regional patterns of disease and death. The discussion concludes with an examination of the reasons for the clinical disappearance of malaria during the nineteenth century, its reappearance after the First and Second World Wars and the possibility of new outbreaks of malaria in the future.

The history of the welfare state is usually treated in an a-geographical manner. A sketch of an argument that this perspective is limited prefaces an empirical assessment of the significance and uneven geography of local government expenditure on welfare services during the inter-war period. Data are presented in real terms (at 1975 prices) and used to describe the financial contribution to the provision of such services made by the local government system as a whole, by urban local government and by individual cities. The conclusion outlines a number of caveats that must surround the interpretation of the data but suggests that the findings are not only relevant to the work of geographers and historians in the field of health and welfare history but more generally that they indicate the need to supplement the history of the welfare state by its historical geography.

Early Virginia (1607-24) was a nightmarish world of disease and death, perhaps uncurpassed in the annals of English colonization. Typhoid fever and dysentery visited Jamestown in recurrent epidemics killing 30 per cent or more of the colonists with each onslaught. Yet Jamestown endured because the leaders of the Virginia Company misapprehended the nexus between the estuarine environment and water-borne, non-immunizing diseases. Each summer, death stalked the town as invading salt water pushed up the estuary and concentrated pathogens in the town's water supply. The prevention of disease and death required the abandonment of Jamestown and relocation into healthier niches, which occurred with the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624.

This paper focuses on one of the major ideological shifts associated with the territorialization of power experienced within Medieval European society, namely the growing exploitation of land. Using empirical evidence from the kingdom of Gwynedd in Wales, it explores the difficulties faced by Medieval societal rulers in translating their new ideologies of state rule into administrative practice. Their inability to create a consistent administrative structure to match their ideological ambitions meant that there was often a geography inherent in the territorialization of power in the Middle Ages, ranging from a close relationship between ideology and practice near the political core of the state to one of increasing discontinuity between the two near its periphery. The author suggests that the English conquest of Gwynedd in the late thirteenth century—one which was characterized by a far greater infrastructural co-ordination—led, to a large extent, to the dissolution of the spatial variations in the administrative realities of the Gwynedd state.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber is one of Germany's most popular tourist destinations attracting over two and a half million visitors annually. Yet, many visitors do not realize that nearly half of Rothenburg's medieval architectural heritage was destroyed in 1945. Its reconstruction was characterized by complex negotiations and compromises as Rothenburgers attempted to balance contemporary preservation philosophies with the town's image as a national symbol and economic interests in a revived tourist trade. These diverse factors were generally complementary and resulted in a remarkably consistent and consensual effort, but the project was not without controversies and contradictions. This article examines the cultural politics of reconstruction in Rothenburg as an attempt to preserve and rebuild the town's image as well as its actual physical structures. Although both the reconstruction of Rothenburg's built environment and its symbolic meaning buttressed the town's status as a national cultural icon, divergent strategies for each project have diminished awareness of the reconstruction period and opportunities for critically engaging this past.

This article discusses the relationship between global development and local changes and also analyzes long-term regional development in the Netherlands and Northwest Germany. Spatial patterns of population growth over the period of 1500–2000 are interpreted from a world-systems perspective. Initially, the coastal regions profited from the emerging trade-based agricultural world-system. Later, state formation enabled some of the previously developed regions to regain positions that were formerly lost. A seesaw of development between land and sea-based regions characterized the first two periods of the world-system. An additional seesaw between concentration in national cores and expansion toward the periphery characterizes the last two periods.

The heather moorland of the Scottish Highlands represents a highly symbolic habitat for the region. Significantly, recent work by ecologists and palaeobotanists has stressed the strong anthropogenic role in its development. Indeed, so vital is the role played by human interference, heather moorland is now seen as a cultural landscape. Yet despite being seen as a cultural landscape, there has hitherto been no attempt to use available documentary evidence to understand how this human interference may have affected its development over recent centuries. This paper examines such evidence, paying particular attention to how human activity contributed to its expansion over the early modern period and to its decline from ca. 1800 onwards, exploring such themes as moor burning, the harvesting of young tree growth, and grazing levels and practices, both before and after the clearances. Particular attention is paid to how the spread of sheep after the clearances contributed to the decline of heather moor and the role that heavy sheep grazing may have played in the deterioration in the quality of Highlands pastures during the mid-nineteenth century.

This essay provides a quantitative analysis of the French urban system from the early-eighteenth century to the early-nineteenth century. Based on a wide variety of data-sources, the analysis indicates the subtle and complex impact of the Revolution of 1789 on the urban hierarchy. A new urban dynamic seems to have emerged during this period characterised by a shift in the locus of economic and demographic power from larger cities to smaller provincial centres. This new structural characteristic persisted throughout the early-nineteenth century. It is suggested that this restructuring resulted from the redistribution within the urban hierarchy of the wealthier, elite classes in the aftermath of 1789.

Based on a sample of 7478 Scottish emigrants, this paper sets out the changing temporal and spatial patterns of Scottish emigration and settlement in pre-Confederation Canada. It identifies where Scottish emigrants came from, where they went in Canada, and whether discrete channels of migration existed. It argues that Scottish emigration consisted of distinct Highland and Lowland flows. Whereas Highland emigration comprised a few major channels of emigration to different parts of Canada, Lowland emigration was relatively diffuse. This was largely due to the community nature of Highland emigration, as compared with the more individualistic Lowland movement.

The Anglo-Irish landlords who governed Ireland for almost 150 years after the 1690s created landscapes on their estates which reflected their origins in Great Britain, their élite status in Ireland and their desire to construct and preserve a stable and ordered set of political and social relations in their adopted country. A study of the archives of the Caldwell family of Castle Caldwell, Co. Fermanagh, in the second half of the eighteenth century, illustrates the dilemmas of identity faced by this group, examines the economic base of an estate and demonstrates the importance of a resident «improving» landlord for the economy and landscape of a relatively remote region.

Increased attention is now being paid to the relationships between cultural and material forces in the process of colonization. This paper examines the relationships developed between Britain and its colonies in the Caribbean through the landed estate, a key working and scenic landscape of late Georgian society, and the georgic discourses surrounding it. A general survey is made of colonial connections and the various media in which landed estates were represented. We argue that many connections can be found between estates in Britain and the Caribbean colonies, through material exchanges and in discourses over landscape, labour and finance. Caribbean property was accommodated by the adoption of conventional modes of representing and managing British landed estates, a process important in the assimilation of the islands as British colonies and in the integration of those with colonial interests into British élite society. But this accommodation was disrupted at certain times and places by debates over slavery in particular. In our case study of the activities of one landowner, Sir George Cornewall, we examine and compare the representation and management of La Taste, his sugar plantation in Grenada, and his Moccas estate, in Herefordshire, and we evaluate his position in British élite society.

Individuals settling new areas have had to rely on a variety of resources, including the social structures inherent in their culture. This study focuses upon the elements of family, kinship and origin in part of nineteenth-century Ontario. It approaches them from the perspectives of interaction over distance and of sociological institution, the particular institution being that of land conveyancing. Data drawn from the surviving parts of the personal and agricultural schedules of the Census of Canada for 1851/52 were searched for the propinquity of individuals to one another. Social interaction seems to have occurred within two miles for most people. Random samples and a series of t-tests suggest that there were no differences in proximity for the members of the different cultural groups but that there were differences between immigrant and established groups with respect to the desires of kin for proximity to one another. These differences were paralleled by differences in the structure of the family. Kinship was also important in determining to whom land was sold; most sales occurred within the particular community. That this was so suggests, according to the model of Steeves, that the level of integration in mid-century Essex was simply embryonic.

Historical maps of the Negev Desert which comprises half of the total land area of Palestine can be viewed from several intersecting perspectives relating to aspects such as their contribution to tracing patterns of settlement and agricultural history, imperialism and mapping, and legal geography of land ownership and indigenous people. Here we focus mainly on the first theme, incorporate new methods and demonstrate their application to studies in historical geography.Since the end of the 18th century the Negev has attracted considerable attention due to its strategic location straddling three continents, its history, and its archeology. After the European powers recognized the geopolitical importance of this area in the mid 19th century, numerous surveys and mapping efforts were conducted. In this study we reviewed 375 historical maps covering parts or all of the Negev between 1799 and 1948. These historical maps are crucial to the understanding of colonial developments, as well as landscape and settlement processes and the sedentarization of the Bedouin population. We scanned and rectified these maps using geographic information systems (GIS) to enable quantitative analysis of their accuracy, and to reveal new insights into settlement and sedentarization processes. Whereas the median error of maps that were based on explorers notes during most of the 19th century were at the order of several kilometers, the various Palestine Exploration Fund surveys (1872–1890) reduced these errors to the order of several hundred meters, and later maps produced by the British during World War I and by British Mandatory Survey of Palestine obtained errors well below 100 m. Careful analysis of these maps allows us to delineate the boundary between cultivated land and the desert, to follow the establishment of new settlements, and to quantify the sedentarization process of the nomadic Bedouin population. We conclude that analyzing historical maps with GIS provides a tool to determine their accuracy and hence potential usefulness for the study of topics such as settlement processes and legal disputes over land ownership.

This study is based on the 1801 Crop Return for England and Wales, an inquiry which took the form of an arable crops census. Over 75% of the county areas of 12 English and Welsh counties is represented in the surviving Return but under 25% for 13 others. For England and Wales together nearly 50% of the total area is represented. The national distribution of the main grain crops is investigated; and an aggregate analysis of arable England and Wales in 1801 is made. The main result is to produce two different estimates to suggest that arable England and Wales was something over 7 million acres and something under 8 million acres in 1801, the higher estimate comparing very favourably with contemporary ones. Finally, since the Return is extant at parish or township level, it is suggested that it can be subjected to further investigation and to sampling, to break free from the constraints imposed by the county approach by studying or identifying farming regions.

After losing the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was exiled to St Helena. As part of the arrangements to keep him secure, the British annexed the island of Tristan da Cunha to deny its possible use to French rescue forces. The military remained on the island for fifteen months, an unpleasant experience, especially given the loss of 55 people in the wreck of H.M.S. Julia in 1817. Using evidence from holdings in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, this paper studies the experiences of the British on the island during 1816 and 1817, illuminating the chaotic military operation and also the difficulties of habitation on Tristan da Cunha. However, the present population of the island traces its origin back to one of the garrison who remained there after 1817.

Mapping of aggregate data on 53 groups of British emigrants in 1820 to the eastern Cape reveals considerable variation in their behaviour. While the impression of failure is frequently mentioned in published accounts, the different types of group appear to have quite distinct patterns of behaviour. Proprietary groups were less persistent and appeared to adopt pastoralism earlier. The joint-stock groups were more tenacious in settlement and pursued a more diverse agriculture, eventually. The planned groups lacked farming experience for the most part, although this did not seem closely linked to subsequent persistence or to degree of success in livestock raising. The study concludes that the basis for permanent occupation of the Albany district that was created in the first four years varied among the groups with persistence linked to social institutional cohesion provided by the mutual support derived from shared origins in Britain as well as occupational background in farming. Additional factors leading to greater persistence may have included shared religious persuasion, as well as the successful diversification of livelihood into pastoralism and frontier trade.

This paper argues that white Barbadian responses to the renewed anti-slavery campaign from 1823 to 1825 were characterized by a combination of strident assertions of loyalty with a more hostile rhetoric of difference and distance. Drawing on work that emphasizes the place of the anti-slavery campaign in the formulation of English identity, this paper considers where such accounts leave white West Indians, and argues that opposition to anti-slavery was linked to the production of white identity in Barbados. It seeks to explore the complex nature of white resistance to anti-slavery, and thus the ambiguous nature of West Indian whiteness, by focusing on a series of texts produced in the aftermath of ameliorative instructions sent out by the British government and of a major slave revolt in Demerara. In particular, it considers a series of anonymous texts produced during a period of intense anti-Methodist persecution. Locating this anti-Methodism within the broader context of opposition to the anti-slavery campaign, these texts encapsulate the ambivalence of identity and difference, loyalty and hostility that characterizes West Indian whiteness in the early nineteenth century. In this way, the paper aims to contribute to a more nuanced historical geography of white identity.

Over the nineteenth century the commercial heart of the City of London experienced a widespread transformation as the traditional mix of houses, shops and small-scale commercial spaces gave way to a new landscape dominated by the large-scale, purpose-built office building. The emergence of such specialized commercial office spaces was a key feature in the development of the modern metropolis. This paper explores this transformation by focusing on the building of new bank headquarters in the City between the 1830s and the 1870s. First, it presents a critical discussion of the relationships between the changing legal and institutional structures of banking in the early nineteenth century and the distinctive architectural forms chosen to represent these new corporate forms of the modern money economy. Second, it grounds these more generalized theoretical and contextual claims in the historical experience of specific banking institutions that built or rebuilt their headquarters in the mid-Victorian City. Emphasizing not only their need for increased physical accommodation, but also the differentiation and legitimation of their new and growing financial power, the paper explores the wider ideological role of the built environment in negotiating the complex and unstable qualities of the modern money economy.

This paper explores the historical relationships between Methodist Sunday school tea treats and parades and the formation of religious identity in west Cornwall between c. 1830 and 1930. Through these ritual activities, people were entrained into the symbolic identity-forming apparatus of Methodist faith and practice. Moving beyond the spaces of school rooms and chapels, the paper focuses on the organisation, the use of public space and the territorial significance of annual tea treats and parades in the nurturing and maintenance of a Methodist constituency. In so doing, the paper draws on work in the history of Nonconformity, geographies of religion and the historical geography of parades to conduct a critical analysis of tea treats and parades as ritual, spectacle and carnival.

Marshes and swamps covered nearly 1400 square miles in central Wisconsin. In turn they were exploited for fur trapping, lumbering, gathering of wild hay and moss, and cranberry growing, but none of these activities supported a large population. In the first 20 years of the twentieth century, about 700 square miles were organized into drainage districts and over 600 farmers moved in. Drainage was a costly failure and by 1930 almost all farmers had departed. Much of the land reverted to public ownership and its wildlife attracted hunters, fisherman and other visitors. At first they came for short vacations in summer. In the 1950s some began to build permanent houses.' Gradually, wildlife habitats were displaced by commercial recreational facilities and solitude was lost. This article chronicles actions taken by successive occupants in changing the marshlands and examines reasons for the failure of settlement.

This paper examines the pamphlets that promoted British colonization of Lower Canada's largely American-settled Eastern Townships during the 1830s. As part of its strategy to stimulate British migration to the region, the imperial government had sold most of the remaining crown land to the London-based British American Land Company. The image that emerges from the letters and testimonials printed in the company's colonization brochures is of a picturesque and healthful environment ideally suited to pastoral agriculture. That image stamped the region with the imperial aesthetic landscape during a politically turbulent era, but it would have little practical appeal to the vast majority of British immigrants who continued up the St Lawrence to Upper Canada where they could produce the cash crops that would facilitate their economic independence.

This paper examines the changing place and status of the timber economy in New Zealand over the hundred years following European colonization. Initial high expectations for the timber trade as an export earner were not realized, instead the industry developed under the shadow of the agricultural frontier. A significant transformation occurred after 1900 because of a timber famine, which saw a conspicuous move by the state to control the industry and later signalled an abrupt shift into large scale exotic afforestaties schemes. Private sector initiatives paralleled those of the State but had a quite separate underlining rationale.

There was a spatial as well as a social dimension to philanthropic housing in Victorian London. Housing agencies learnt by experience to avoid the poorest parts of London, where it was impossible to satisfy the financial demands of philanthropic capitalism. But they could afford to build in more favourable districts only by taking advantage of indirect subsidies offered by aristocratic landlords and the Metropolitan Board of Works. The mismatch between areas of need and areas of supply made it unlikely that the poor benefited even indirectly, through “levelling up”.

The paper examines aspects of the development of consumers' co-operation in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century to the years immediately after the First World War. This was an important period in the extension of a ‘consumer society’, increasingly based on mass-consumption, but it also saw co-operative attempts collectively to empower consumers with ideological and material resources to contest the meanings of consumption and promote a vision of socio-economic transformation. This challenge to consumer society, most strongly expressed in Europe's industrial regions, is inadequately represented in most historical studies which concentrate on what are seen as consumption's dominant capitalistic and individualistic traits. Although some of the most visible early initiatives were found in Britain, co-operatives assumed their own particular characters within the different national and regional arenas of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. The paper examines the political context of co-operative development and establishment attempts to defuse its transformatory potential, especially where consumers' co-operation became overtly associated with socialism. Co-operation was weakened, however, by the fracturing of the supposed universalism of a shared identity as consumers by the particularism of political and geographical loyalties. Co-operation's ultimate failure to curb the extension of capitalist commerce should not prevent a recognition of the development of modern consumer society in Europe as a contested process.

The conventional story of suburbanization in Canada and the United States portrays an outward movement of residences from the cities that only since World War II has been fuelled by the dispersal of employment to the urban fringe. This prevailing wisdom needs considerable revision. In this essay we present a theoretical interpretation of industrial suburbanization. We argue that the outward spread of factories and manuÍfacturing districts has been a distinctive and important feature of North American urbanization since the middle of the nineteenth century. The paper begins with a discussion of how industrial decentralization has been repeatedly misinterpreted as new and unprecedented, rather than an extension of past trends. In contrast to the prevailing interpretation, we claim that industrial suburbanization is the product of a combination of the economic logic of geographical industrialization, investment in real estate, and political guidance by business and government leaders. The result has been extensive, multinodal metropolitan regions.

This paper examines the individuals and bodies engaged in the development of British towns and cities between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Particular attention is given to the supplanting of local owners, architects and builders by external firms and the extent to which activity was concentrated among fewer firms over time. Previous findings are re-examined and synthesized, and the results of new research are presented. A major source of information is building applications submitted to local authorities. The most important changes took place in the two decades following the First World War. Having had a major role in the nineteenth century, especially as providers of capital, private individuals ceased to have a significant place in urban development by the 1930s, other than in their role as owner-occupiers and owners of potential development land. Responsibility for the establishment of institutional sites rested with a variety of individuals and organizations in the nineteenth century, but became much more concentrated in the hands of local authorities in the inter-war period. Significant numbers of non-local architects were engaged in the design of public buildings as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, but building work of all kinds was still being undertaken almost entirely by local builders even in the 1930s. The large-scale introduction of non-local architects in the inter-war years was related to the influx of non-local owners. On the whole, local influences declined sooner in towns close to major cities.

The San Francisco Bay Area demonstrates how industrial dispersal had created the sprawling form of the American metropolis. Neither change in transport modes nor residential suburbanization is principally responsible for shaping the outward spiral of urbanization. Manufacturing began its outward march from the outset of the city's industrialization, establishing peripheral nodes of employment and working class residence within San Francisco, then beyond the city limits in South San Francisco and especially the East Bay. The main cause of decentralization has been industrial shifts; the outbreak of new activities in new places, normally in the form of industrial districts at various spatial scales. A second cause has been the orchestration of development by business leaders through property ownership and political manoeuvring guided by a general vision of metropolitan expansion, whether in co-operation or competition with one another.

This paper examines the development of Montreal's industrial geography between 1850 and 1929. It is argued that a decisive feature of the evolution of the city's industrial and social landscape was the emergence of industrial districts on the moving urban frontier. The formation of new suburban districts and the reorganization of existing industrial districts were part of a developing urban spatial division of manufacturing. Three critical features underlay the restructuring of Montreal's industrial geography after 1850. Waves of industrial expansion and the development of a range of production trajectories altered the parameters of location within the city. Working-class suburbanization provided the requisite labour force for firms locating on the periphery. Local political and economic alliances created the physical, ideological and legal structures for suburban industrial growth and the rearrangement of the urban fabric.

Between 1851 and 1901 the scale of co-operative retailing in England and Wales increased markedly, with a significant surge of foundations c1860. Success was not, however, geographically uniform. The degree to which societies were concentrated in south-east Lancashire and the West Riding declined, but co-operation remained strongest in parts of northern industrial England and the eastern midlands. Especial weakness in London epitomized difficulties experienced by co-operatives in the largest cities. Weakness was not necessarily a reflection of a lack of early efforts to establish societies—these were more numerous and widespread than previously acknowledged. Awareness of co-operative ideas spread widely and quickly, but they were often difficult to put into effect and some societies collapsed rapidly. This partly arose from inadequate understanding of the practicalities of retail trading. It also reflected differing local circumstances affecting the relative collective power and identity of workers and the employers and private retailers who opposed or competed with co-operation. Differences in spheres such as the adequacy of private retail provision, the occupational diversity of the workforce, the level and manner of wage payments, community and residential mobility mesh together with forces related to information diffusion to begin to explain the pattern of local variation in co-operative success underlying bold regional contrasts in its strength. This range of influences reflects the complicated nature of co-operation as both an exercise in working-class collectivism and a commercial operation.

Permanent and temporary movement of population from the rural Highlands to the urban Lowlands was a major element in the demographic modernisation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland. Most studies of Highland-Lowland migration have considered movement between birthplace and place of enumeration as the result of single direct moves. Little attention has been paid to the “steps” by which migrants actually moved. This paper examines sources which allow reconstruction of stepwise migration patterns of a sample of Highland migrants to late-nineteenth-century Glasgow. The source is critically assessed in relation to other work both on stepwise migration and on Highland-Lowland migration in Scotland.